We recently reported on big changes in the OCZ SSD lineup under Toshiba. OCZ’s previous line of SSDs was cut down to just two SATA drives. The upcoming RD400 PCIe SSD was simply listed as "coming soon," with no indication of when OCZ would be back in the PCIe SSD market. Today "soon" has come, and Toshiba has announced its OCZ RD400 NVMe SSD. This drive can use four lanes of PCIe Gen3 connectivity to deliver some impressive claimed performance numbers.
The new drive pops into an M.2 slot, and Toshiba offers a bundle with a PCIe x4 M.2 adapter card for those of us without native M.2 slots on our motherboards. It's being offered in capacities ranging from 128GB to 1TB. Here are the specs for the entire RD400 lineup, along with comparison information for the biggest PCIe consumer SSDs from Samsung and Intel:
| Drive | Max sequential (MB/s) | Max random (IOps) | ||
| Read | Write | Read | Write | |
| OCZ RD400 128GB | 2200 | 620 | 170K | 110K |
| OCZ RD400 256GB | 2600 | 1150 | 210K | 140K |
| OCZ RD400 512GB | 2600 | 1600 | 190K | 120K |
| OCZ RD400 1TB | 2600 | 1600 | 210K | 140K |
| Intel 750 Series 1.2TB | 2400 | 1200 | 440K | 290K |
| Samsung 950 Pro 512GB | 2500 | 1500 | 300K | 110K |
Those numbers are certainly enthusiast-grade, but they do fall a little short of the competition in some respects. The biggest Samsung 950 Pro and the Intel 750 Series 1.2TB both claim significantly higher random read performance than the RD400, for example. The sequential peformance from OCZ's biggest RD400 is pretty darn impressive, though.
The M.2 NVMe SSD field has been a little bit bare since the introduction of Samsung's 950 Pro, so we're happy to see growing competition in this space. Toshiba has provided TR with a review sample of the RD400, so we'll have more concrete performance numbers coming soon. Stay tuned.
